In 1928 the CPUSA expelled American Communists sympathetic to Leon Trotsky and his faction battling Joseph Stalin for control of the international Communist movement. They reconstituted themselves as the Communist League of America. Although a tiny group, estimated at perhaps 100 members, it included several prominent founders of American Communism (e.g. James Cannon) and some talented and energetic organizers. The group made contact with Trotsky sympathizers in other countries, established a journal,
The Militant, and pursued an energetic propaganda campaign that led to modest expansion.

In 1934, the group entered the Socialist Party en masse, establishing a caucus within the SP. This strategy facilitated recruitment to the Trotskyist group but inevitably aggravated factionalism within the Socialist Party. In the summer of 1937, the SP began expelling Trotskyists. Those remaining left the SP and established the Socialist Workers Party in December 1937. While still a small group, they had expanded to more than 1000 members between 1928 and 1937, included a number of prominent intellectuals, and had somewhat more political prominence than might be expected from their numbers.

However the movement’s growth was repeatedly compromised by factional splits in which ideological disputes among the leadership promoted splits and formation of tiny rival organizations. In the most serious of these episodes, perhaps 40% of the SWP’s membership seceded to found the Worker’s Party lead by Max Shachtman.

By the 1960s, although the SWP still had not grown much larger than its peak membership before the Shachtmanite split it looked somewhat more significant. The collapse of the CPUSA after 1956 left the SWP as the most energetic and visible of the Old Left parties. Their endorsement of Malcolm X garnered some sympathy among Black radicals, and their support for the Cuban Revolution, such as their participation in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, also earned support among the emerging New Left generation. They likewise played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement helping to organize some of the largest demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and other major cities.

In the long run, however, none of this activity resulted in permanent expansion of the organization beyond the modest levels that had characterized it throughout its history.

Four Pamphlets from
The Case for Socialism as Presented at the Famous Minneapolis Labor Trial Collection. Pamphlets Entitled "Socialism on Trial", "Why We are in Prison", "In Defense of Socialism" and "Who are the 18 Prisoners", March, 1944

Despite its small numbers—a peak combined membership of no more than 3,000 in all of its tendencies--the American Trotskyist movement suffered from factionalism and splits throughout its history. That was probably a function of the movement’s ideological heritage and structure. While Socialist and Social Democratic Parties in the US and elsewhere also experienced factional conflict, except in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, these did not generally produce organizational splits because the parties conceived of themselves as big tent electoral coalition parties, not unlike their bourgeois counterparts. The Trotskyists, in contrast, took from their Communist heritage Leninist notions of centralized and ideologically coherent parties that enforced correct line discipline on all members. But while the Communists had an institutional apparatus—the Comintern and its successors—to establish the terms and limits of orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had no such institutional counterpart. People who believed that establishing and adhering to a correct line was the sine qua non of worthwhile political activity thus had no alternative to splits when they decided that their parent organization had erred grievously in its ideological and strategic judgments.

The largest and most enduring American Trotskyist organization was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Other Trotskyist groups represented in the American Left Ephemera Collection include the Workers Party (followers of Max Shachtman), the Spartacist League (an offshoot of the Shachtmanites), and the Workers World Party (followers of ex-CP and ex-SWP member Sam Marcy).

Box 11

Folder

119

The New International, A Symposium on The New Europe, July, 1949

Folder

120

"The Communist Party at the Crossroads: Toward Democratic Socialism or Back to Stalinism", By H.W. Benson